I’M NOT LOOKING
for Heidi Clow
I’m not looking for the foolsgold
of the body of God
or any other miscreance of reality
that people put their faith in like a cup.
The darkness can see further than I can
and there are stars I would rather avoid
for the way they bend the space around me
into a bag of skin plump with water
leaking out through nine holes
as if all we could do were only borrow
the ocean for awhile
and not hang on to it as if it were ours.
And time doesn’t belong to anyone
That’s why it’s so impersonal.
One life? One theme? What nonsense
when everyone’s the murmuring
of innumerable rivers
flowing into one another
like a bloodstream through the night.
Let the ghosts come and go as they please
without giving up your seat at the table
whatever fable is summoned
to dispossess you.
Remain free enough
to be unbounded by your freedom
to wear chains if you wish or nothing at all.
And don’t go around trying to pull legends
out of your ass or your skull
like swords out of the magic stone
that made you king
when the gates of the spirit
you can’t prove you have
swing on one post
like the crowns of the flowers
all along the royal roads
that lead everywhere but home again
because everything is deranged by our absence
and you might be the cause of a lot of things
but who can assess the effect
by consulting themselves
like an estranged mirror
that breaks at any suggestion
of what a human can do
to keep their exiles
from killing their refugees?
The gazelles of light
don’t come down to the river at night
like a protocol of the moon
to drink from a polluted mirror
that’s been savaged
by the toxic watersheds of the dead
who malign every thought
of ever finding the grail
that might clarify all of this
that is your mind
with lead.
Bury the dead.
Don’t marry them.
They’re trying to mend fates of their own
like fishermen on a further shore
and you can stand as long as you want
at the gates of belief
with your hat in your hand
trying to understand
the mineral callousness
that unmarrows our bones,
unappeasable grief among gravestones,
and tears us out of our deepest intimacies
like the pages of a diary or leaves
on an early evening autumn wind
buffing the dusk with crows.
But the greater misgiving
is to mistake severance for the knife
of an implacable law
and descecrate
the ubiquitous dead
by judging that lost
that goes on making a living inside you
like a root of your own
turning dark matter into light
like Merlin
or Hermes the thrice-blessed
gone underground
to apprentice the dead
no saviour can raise
to the power of their own magic.
You can’t pour the universe
out of the universe
anymore than you can pour
your mind out of your mind.
Where’s it going to go
that isn’t it?
And where are you going to go
that isn’t you?
And how can there be
an inside and an outside
where things come and go
like the shadows of birds
on the autumn moon
and the way the protean shapes of things
keep on changing
and life goes on engendering itself
like an embryo with a mother in the making,
who isn’t giving birth to everyone all the time
in every cell of their being?
And when was one eye
ever the whole of your seeing?
And how do I know
I’m not what the dead
are going through right now
like an intersecting galaxy
with so much inner space
that the stars of the one
don’t get in the way of the stars of the other?
Apple-bloom on a dead branch
the faces we wear among one another
like shedding calendars of doom
gathered around the equinoctial gravestone
that takes the measure of our day and night
by aligning our shadows to the light.
What else are we
if not this occasion of breath
upon the great seas of awareness
that brings forth the world as we know it
only to suffer this dream of loss
when the bride takes back her mirror
like a receding tide
and we breathe out
and disappear?
And for centuries
in lonely, impoverished rooms,
and ghoulish restaurants late a night
and on our knees
before agonies of paint and wood
in houses of iron and stone,
and in the amazing cities
crawling with assassins
in the alleys of belief,
and in our desparate hearts
like cheat sheets
to an exam even God couldn’t pass
squarely under the eyes
of a dispassionate invigilator,
in prisons and madhouses and hospitals
in bitter palaces that have dried like India ink
in cancercamps and bombed out villages
and in the parking lots of deathwish shopping malls
we’ve been writing shit like this to ourselves for years
and still there is no end of the tears
we try to send out like roots and rain after the dead
who go on cracking like mirrors
listening to the sad advice
of orchards in an ice-storm.
So is it madly inconceivable
to long to inspire the dead so intensely
with the grace of a dark beatitude
that doesn’t hide its face
when the moon turns around
that we can sponsor their night journey
like migrating geese
as the Ojibway do every fall
with the magnanimity of our farewells?
Can’t we learn to say good-bye
as we have learned like heavy bells
and oarless empty lifeboats
that never leave shore
that there’s only the slightest hope of rescue
and instead of mourning
like wells in the rain
that have been cheated of water,
part the dark veils like fountains of light
and reveal the face
the dead wear like the moon
is still their own,
even if you must look
into your own eyes
like water into water
without sides
to see it?
Are the departures not as much
as the myriad beginnings of everything
as everything else always is
in this inseparable moment
without birth and death
that neither unifies or divides
the thresholds we abandoned like trees
for the rootless vagrancy
of our own two feet?
Every step of the way
we are estranged and greeted
by the road we make with our walking
until everywhere and nowhere
is home to the refugee
human life is.
There is no journey
you can come to the end of
like a snake that has swallowed its own tail
up to its head
until the swallowed
and the swallower
the eater and the eaten
the grass and the grazer
the living and the dead
life and death
are the same mouth
and hunger and fulfillment
creation and annihilation
are neither one nor two
but just the space that sustains us
like starbread cooling on the windowsills
of the afterlife of wheat
and on the vines
that have mingled
the earth and the night
and the light and the rain
into bloodlines that run like rivers
down the mountains of a map
into the boundless rosy-fingered sea
of the unborn generations of the wine.
Life consumes itself
to ensure that everything lives,
breaks itself like bread like death and gives
the farmer back to the wheat
under a new moon in familiar fields.
Life lives on life
like the worlds within worlds it takes
to create a god
who sacrifices
the whole of herself like a seed
in the solitude of her dark abundance
to keep what she sadly gives away
like a woman who died young
still gathering flowers
like Persephone and Heidi
to return every spring like an orchard
to the severity of the absence
that never stops waiting for her;
because the blossoms of the beginning
are the blossoms of the end
and yesterday and tomorrow
are the two eyes of now
that can see how the deserts
on the far side of the moon
return us to ourselves in tears
like the waters of life
as the great night sea nears.
PATRICK WHITE
